Hiding in Plain Sight: Haiti’s Post-Earthquake Organ Harvesting

In 2010 after the Haitian earthquake, CNN reporter Elizabeth Cohen (senior medical correspondent) stumbled into a surgical tent and broadcast the report seen in this video.

First she states that medical supplies are severely limited. Next she says that medical personal were using belts and garden hoses as tourniquets.

The a minute 1:15, Cohen drops the bombshell:

“They only have two blood pressure cuffs for 200 patients. On the other hand, what they do have is corneas. Yes, these are corneas from cadavers that people lovingly donated. They’re not doing cornea surgery here, they are barely able to do amputations. Nobody knows how these ended up here, I found them under a table next to a box of granola bars.”

Numerous nothing-to-see-here, move-along dumbbells out there might claim this is merely “incompetence” similar to 9/11. You know that was when the many incompetents responsible for taking down air defenses were promoted. Others might claim these are prosthetic corneas.

Get real, or go back to Saturday afternoon cartoons. For the record, there are methods that allow corneas to be stored at room temperatures for short periods. The box probably had a cooling mechanism. Further, in the last video, the former president of Haiti claims that aggressive and unethical organ transplant harvesting was taking place after the earthquake.

TNN verdict: The ethical considerations couldn’t be more clear. This “medical staff” came suited and booted to perform organ transplants but just so happened to leave even minimal treatment gear behind. Secondly, in a non-Crime Syndicate triage situation with emergency mass casualties, organ harvesting is way down on the list of priorities. Any more questions?

This article originally appeared on The New Nationalist and was re-published here with permission.